Word: painter
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There were a few exceptions to this honor roll of stupidity, mainly other painters. Impressionists such as Claude Monet, younger than he, saw Manet as their hero and leader--although he never exhibited with their group. Charles Baudelaire was his friend; Emile Zola famously defended him in 1866 and partially based the implausible chief character of his novel L'Oeuvre (The Masterpiece) on Manet--though, less famously, he changed his mind after Manet's death and called him "not a very great painter...an incomplete talent...
What were Manet's influences? Like any great painter, he had a whole museum locked in memory. He paid particular attention to Spanish painters--Velazquez, Goya--whose work he mainly knew from prints, until he made the journey to Spain (no picnic for a traveler then) in 1865. Clearly he was much taken by the Spanish still-life painter Sanchez Cotan, and by the tradition of the vanitas--images of objects gathered together to symbolize the transience of pleasure and earthly life. And then, particularly, there was Chardin, the 18th century French master of still life, whose benign and composed...
DIED. John Painter, 112, Tennessee farmer, blacksmith and reputedly the nation's oldest male veteran, having served on Army front lines in France during World World I; in Hermitage Springs, Tenn...
...definitive influence on him, however, was the 15th century Italian painter Piero della Francesca, whose cycle of murals Legend of the True Cross Balthus saw on a visit to Italy in 1926. Piero's unique combination of physical intensity and complex, abstract formality seems to have shaped Balthus' deepest pictorial ambitions. But the streak of ambiguous desire he brought to his imagery of the nude was peculiar to Balthus, and it invested his work with a permanent scent of scandal...
...Balthus' talents did not run to avant-garde ambitions. He was entirely a figurative painter--there was no abstract phase to his work--and his reverence for past masters, from Piero and Poussin to Courbet and Manet, was so absolute that his work is a virtually seamless homage to them, not so much in subject matter as in studiously quoted poses and meticulously conscious structures. His power of organization was awesome; his spread of quotation, wide. What caused the individual citations to hang together, though, was his eye for nature. Nowhere is this clearer than in his huge composition...